Unfortunately, your access has now expired. But there’s good news—by subscribing today, you will receive 22 issues of Booklist magazine, 4 issues of Book Links, and single-login access to Booklist Online and over 160,000 reviews.

Your access to Booklist Online has expired. If you still subscribe to the print magazine, please proceed to your profile page and check your subscriber number against a current magazine mailing label. (If your print subscription has lapsed, you will need to renew.)

A Wreath for Emmett Till.

Nelson, Marilyn (author).

“I was nine years old when Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. His name and history have been a part of most of my life,” writes the creator of award-winning Carver (2001) in the introduction to this offering--a searing poetry collection about Till’s brutal, racially motivated murder. The poems form a heroic crown of sonnets--a sequence in which the last line of one poem becomes the first line of the next. “The strict form became a kind of insulation, a way of protecting myself from the intense pain of the subject matter,” writes Nelson. The rigid form distills the words’ overwhelming emotion into potent, heart-stopping lines that speak from changing perspectives, including that of a tree. Closing notes offer context to the sophisticated allusions to literature and history, but the raw power of many lines needs no translation. Nelson speaks of human history’s deep contradictions: “My country, ‘tis both / thy nightmare history and thy grand dream.” But there’s also the hope that comes from facing the past and moving forward: “In my house, there is still something called grace, / which melts ice shards of hate and makes hearts whole.” When matched with Lardy’s gripping, spare, symbolic paintings of tree trunks, blood-red roots, and wreaths of thorns, these poems are a powerful achievement that teens and adults will want to discuss together.  Gillian Engberg